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Presenting IT Budgets Graphically

Asking for the IT budget that you need is a perpetual struggle. It’s easy for decision makers to downgrade the importance of your budget request in favour of funding something in the organization’s main line of business. If you’re a municipality, then fixing roads, if you’re a school district, then better resources for students or teachers. Here are three ways that you can use graphics that I think will grab some attention.

By Ellen Koskinen-Dodgson

Ellen Koskinen-Dodgson is President and Managing Partner of TMC IT and Telecom Consulting Inc. She is an IT and Telecommunications Management Consultant, electrical engineer, author, speaker, media resource and Expert Witness.

The Normal Way

Everyone presents their budgets as a table of line items with a simple description, a short justification and a dollar amount, with everything totalled at the bottom. Every department does the same and you end up with a dozen departments asking for money that adds up to much more than the available dollar amounts that will be allocated.

Obviously, it isn’t possible to provide everyone the full amount of money that they ask for so you need to be persuasive.

Using Graphics

Help senior management think about what you’re asking for in terms that align with their thinking. Financially- focused executives don’t understand the role that IT plays in the organization’s operations and initiatives.

Categorize your requests by the Gartner model:

Use graphics to show the percentage of each that your budget request supports. Perhaps you could pair it with a graphic that shows the breakdown if you were following best practices. It’s often quite an eye opener.

Or Tie It To Strategy

An alternate approach is to create a graphic that shows what percentage of the IT budget is focused on supporting the organization’s strategic goals. You might find that you have a solid circle showing 100% of IT budget is being used to support things that are not aligned with organizational strategic objectives. That is, your budget has 0% allocated to supporting strategic initiatives.

This clearly demonstrates that IT needs even more money. Now that’s a conversation starter!

If You Need More Money

It’s your job to ask for all of the money that you need to properly deliver the services that the organization has mandated, but many IT managers/ directors know that they won’t get the money that they ask for so they don’t even ask.

if you have asked for less than you need in the past and you have some built-up underfunding, then you’ll need an extra graphic in the set. I recommend that you present:

If you’d like to explore these ideas further or comment on this article, contact me at .

This article was published in the March 2023 edition of The TMC Advisor
- ISSN 2369-663X Volume:10 Issue:3

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